The Unsentimental Journey

In an age of shifting values, even those who reject most deliberately all Christian standards are unable to free themselves from the complex and pervasive influence of a recent profoundly Christocentric past. The Jewish race alone escapes such influence. With a combination of a practical grasp of detail and a high imaginative vision it is given to the representatives of the Semitic culture to view that Christendom in which they never merged. To those so vitally concerned it is of interest to observe the Christian structure as seen through the alien eyes beneath the caftan, patient and suffering. Among those groups familiar with the Western European peoples, two standpoints remain defined and clear, the Catholic and pre-Christian. How deep is the contrast between these long inherited traditions and the wavering affirmations made in the gaunt mental shadows of that great, wrecked, Lutheran Theology which still cumbers the mind and the prepossessions? Freed from such burden the pre-Christian tradition now reveals a curiously integral quality : Lion Feuchtwanger in this points the example. He can describe, in some ways more clearly than a less remote writer, the external apparatus of the Christian life and the flavour, for no other word can so well express it, of certain individual Christian lives. Still he has the defects of his great qualities, and in dealing with the Goyim he is limited, as far as successful portraiture is concerned, to those in whom all trace of the Christian spirit has vanished. He has, in fact, an admirable gallery of portraits of those who only wear the Christian mask

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